Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 01:49 pm

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I was interested to read this post on the Mercia Group about how accountants can measure their return on investment for their digital marketing efforts and it made me think about how many small businesses measure their returns on both digital and “off-line” marketing and whether they do this correctly.

It’s my experience that many small businesses measure the results of digital marketing in terms of how effective their SEO is but do this the wrong way.  Is SEO effective when pages on your site appear on the first page of Google for a search or is it effective when you get an enquiry or a sale from a visitor to the site?

If you think about this for a few seconds, you are in business and the whole point of being in business is to earn money so that it allows you to do what you want to do, be that spend time on the golf course, have holidays 3 times a year, buy a nice home, put your children through university or even just have enough put aside to allow you to retire and live comfortably.  Does having a first page listing in the search engines earn you money or is it the sales you make as a result of the website?

You may be approached by an SEO firm (usually out of the blue and often from India in my experience) that say you are not featuring in the results and then proceed to “optimise” your site for your business name so that you are at the top of the results if someone searches for your name.  However, there are two problems with this, the first is that people wouldn’t search for your name unless they have already heard of you (think about the number of accountants for example in your locality, how many of them can you recall the name of and allow  you to search for them).  The second problem with optimising a site for a business name is that many sites would already do so (search for our sites name “forest software” and hopefully you should find us at the top of Google, but have you ever heard of us?).

So, you want to measure the ROI on your SEO efforts, you know the cost of the work (either because you are paying someone to carry out the work for you or because you are do the work in-house so can work out the cost per hour).  The next thing  you need to know is the number of sales you have made as a result of the website – this is where many small businesses fall down.  It’s easy to work out if you are an ecommerce site (like this one selling electronic cigarettes for example), but if you are a bricks-n-mortar shop this is a more difficult thing to do as your site may well be sending people to the shop because they have found you online but want to pick up the item (whether that’s a tv, computer, sofa or even something as simple as blocks of polymer clay).  Of course you could ask everyone that visits the shop how they found our about you but if you are a busy shop that can be a little excessive.  If you run a professional firm such as accountants, solicitors or surveyors for example then you may have a form that you fill in when you get an enquiry and you could ask a question when filling in the form.

So, can you truly measure the ROI on your digital marketing efforts?  My personal view is thatto do it properly may it may depend on the kind of business that you run – an ecommerce site should allow you to measure it fully while a site for an bricks-n-mortar business or even if the site is a brochure site for your business or organisation then it may be a very difficult thing to do.

What do you think?  Are you able to measure the return on investment on your digital marketing or is it a lot more difficult to do than you first thought?  I’d love to hear your experiences.